What’s Next for the Next Generation of Environmental Rights Cases?

Jozee Zuñiga has lived alongside the petroleum industry her whole life. A 24-year-old native of New Mexico’s Permian Basin, her father worked in the oil fields until his passing in 2016. Growing up, two natural gas pipelines went through the Zuñiga’s family’s property; today, nine do. “While oil and gas operations have always been present in the area, they really tripled in the last couple of years,” she said.

For some time, Zuñiga herself considered a career in oil-related sciences. (“On the environmental friendliness side,” she clarified.) But soon the health issues arrived: Debilitating migraines became regular. Sensitivities to noise, light and smell arose. Fatigue set in. Some days, she could barely keep her eyes open at school. 

When she returned to her hometown of Carlsbad, New Mexico during a college break, she was resting when she felt a tremor. “It was my first Permian Basin earthquake,” she recalled. “And my family was like, ‘Oh, we’ve been getting them for a few months now.’”

The feeling was deeply unsettling, she said, and it stuck with her. She investigated further online and came across social media posts raising serious concerns over environmental harm caused by oil and gas drilling in the area. She connected with Youth United 4 Climate Crisis Action, or YUCCA, an environmental justice group holding rallies at the state capitol to call on lawmakers to intervene. She was invited to testify about her own complications and, shortly after, became a plaintiff in a lawsuit the organization was involved in, Atencio v. New Mexico.

Atencio is just one of several cases on state dockets this year, spanning from Florida to Alaska, that pits citizens against polluters and the states where they reside. With the federal government retreating from any significant role in combating climate change, the lawsuits represent a growing legal movement to shift environmental rights and action to the local level — which, supporters argue, is where most lived experiences like Zuñiga’s unfold. In many ways, state courts are where some of the most substantial fights in the United States are unfolding over life on our rapidly warming planet. The success or failure of these cases will have wide-ranging implications for this new frontline.

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For most of its history, America’s environmental policy largely emanated from the states. Municipalities oversaw the plants that powered homes, schools, offices, and more; the reservoirs where drinking water came from; the sewers where waste went; and the transit networks that took people from point A to B. But as federal power grew in the 1960s and 1970s, so, too, did its role in environmental regulation. The Nixon administration’s clean water and air acts helped establish the Environmental Protection Administration, which held states accountable for improving water and air quality and provided funding for remediation. And, at least until recently, the so-called Chevron doctrine gave Washington wide latitude over enacting such rules.

In the decades since, states have developed cohesive strategies and regulatory frameworks to comply with federal guidelines. Still, so much of the service delivery of climate-related infrastructure — our electrical grids, roads, waterways, and more — is left to the states. That gap between what Washington wants and what states do has been a focal point for recent litigation.

The argument at the core of Atencio is that New Mexico did not follow its “pollution control” doctrine as laid out in its constitution, which says that the state has to protect its residents from the adverse effects of industrial processes. The coalition of community groups, Indigenous people, environmental groups, and youth activists, including Zuñiga, who brought the case also assert they have been denied the right to due process and equal protection under the law. After losing an appeal last June, where the court found that the judiciary lacked authority to weigh in, the New Mexico Supreme Court will now hear the case.

Two other cases offer disparate paths of what could come next. In Navahine F. v. Hawaii Department of Transportation, filed in 2022, a group of young adults claimed that the state wasn’t doing enough to decarbonize its transportation network, a key source of emissions, damaging their future on the islands. They argued that Hawaii had not created a “clean and healthy environment,” as its constitution demands, and violated the “public trust” duty, which obliges the state to protect the islands’ precious resources. In response, the Hawaii Department of Transportation committed to concrete actions with ongoing youth input to reach its reduction goals by 2045, in a resolution, now known as “the Navahine treatment,” hailed as the first of its kind.

Isaac Moriwake, a managing attorney at Earthjustice, which co-led the case, said he hadn’t seen a case quite like Navahine in his 25 years of practice. “That case featured Indigenous perspectives and interests front and center, with more than half the youth plaintiffs representing the Native Hawaiian community,” Moriwake said in an email. “I’m not sure whether other youth climate cases have had such a specific focus and emphasis on Indigenous communities, certainly to the extent as Navahine.” His office is now focused on ensuring the state Department of Transportation follows through on the court-ordered settlement made in 2024.

Like Hawaii and other states, Montana has a “green amendment” enshrined in its state constitution, a victory of a larger national movement pushed by environmental advocates in recent years. So when a law was passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature to ban the state’s agencies from weighing carbon emissions and climate change projections in their environmental reviews, another group of young adults sued, arguing that the law also violated their right to a “clean and healthy environment.” 

In a landmark 2024 ruling in Held v. Montana, the Montana Supreme Court agreed. But since then, Montana lawmakers have passed legislation to restrict the scope of the environmental review process entirely, which, Held plaintiffs argue, weakens public protections. 

For Andrea Rodgers, the deputy director of U.S. litigation at Our Children’s Trust, the widely divergent outcomes are part of the process. The nonprofit was formed in 2010 to test a strategy to leverage the green amendments as a stress-test on states, with youth climate activists leading the charge. Held and Navahine were part of that portfolio.

In December, Our Children’s Trust filed, on behalf of the Held plaintiffs, a petition in the Montana Supreme Court claiming the new Montana laws “re-blindfold state agencies” reviewing fossil fuel projects and violate the state constitution as interpreted in Held. The state supreme court declined to immediately take up the case but said it should proceed in the trial court.

“We’ve learned a lot during our time doing this. We’ve had wins, and we’ve had losses,” said Rodgers. “But it’s really important to have a federal and state constitutional strategy, and that plays out in a variety of different ways, depending on what the movement is.”

Our Children’s Trust has cases pending in Alaska, Florida, Utah, and Wisconsin, with more planned for other jurisdictions. The filings follow a familiar playbook: Young plaintiffs sue state lawmakers for violating the rights that, they contest, are afforded to them under their state constitutions.

Rodgers remains hopeful of the trend. “We’re continuing to develop this jurisprudence in a number of states,” she said in an interview. “And we’re seeing significant development there on questions like, what is the right to a safe climate? And where is it properly housed within the constitution?”

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States are nexuses for environmental action in other ways as well. Cases like Held, Atencio, and Navahine demonstrate how change can be vertical, with the public prodding statehouses to do more. But simultaneously, states and municipalities can expand the horizon of what’s possible: California’s strict tailpipe standards for cars, for example, once inspired Washington to raise the national bar. Similarly, climate policies in cities often stretch farther than the status quo, like New York’s congestion pricing program, which, when enacted in 2025 amidst lawsuits, was the first of its kind in the nation. These “laboratories of democracy,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called states, help produce innovative responses to increasingly complex challenges.

Enter state-backed “superfund” laws, which New York and Vermont both passed in 2024. While they technically share the same name as a federal cleanup liability, these policies place fines on major polluters, which, in turn, fund climate adaptation and disaster response projects. On paper, the concept is simple: Private entities that knowingly harm the environment have to literally pay for the consequences. Under the policy, any company that has contributed over a billion tons of greenhouse gases between 2000 and 2024 is subject to a one-time penalty.

Almost immediately, the laws were legally challenged. The pending lawsuits, issued by the U.S. Department of Justice and backed by 22 states with Republican legislatures and the fossil fuel industry, have been brought against both New York and Vermont in their respective U.S. district courts. The plaintiffs say their states’ potential loss of tax revenue from said fines provides them with standing to sue. 

The case argues that the federal Clean Air Act — the loftier legislation mentioned earlier —preempts and precludes the states from acting. The plaintiffs additionally allege that fining private companies for pollution violates their due process under the 14th Amendment and the interstate commerce clause, since companies are often based in other, if not several, states. It also cites the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires “just compensation for legal seizure;” the excessive fines clause of the Eighth Amendment, which bars the government from imposing fines that are not consummate with the injury; and similar provisions in the state constitutions.

The contentious lawsuits will likely play out in federal courthouses this year. Some legal experts are skeptical of their success. The programs created by the laws have yet to be fully implemented, they say, and critics question the applicability of the interstate commerce clause because fines are targeted at private companies, not other states. Still, uncertainty over the fate of such legislation has stalled efforts in Massachusetts to enact similar laws. Meanwhile, at least 10 other Democratic-led states are actively considering them, exposing a clear political divide over a question that persists in climate litigation today: Who’s responsible for taking action to protect the environment?

For Zuñiga, the young New Mexico native, the answer is increasingly apparent. Health and work complications kept her away from advocacy around the Atencio case for a large part of last year. But, in 2026, she said she’s excited to join her fellow activists, who are mostly Gen Z or younger, to raise awareness around the issues. 

Outside of the lawsuit, she’s helping to promote a documentary she worked on that features neighbors who live in the Permian Basin. Like Rodgers, she shared that she’s been deeply inspired to see people her age taking to the courts to affect the change they want to see where they live. But for her, it was only a matter of time.

“There’s a lot of bravery that comes with it, and I think the reason we’re seeing young people start to step up to the plate really early is the sense of urgency,” said Zuñiga. “We’re at a point where some of these young people have grown up where their homes have been actively destroyed by climate change, or they’re starting to be destroyed.”

“And I think this generation is just ready to put their foot down and say no.”

John Surico is a journalist and researcher. His reporting can be found in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg, and elsewhere. He teaches city-centric reporting at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and serves as the Senior Fellow for Climate and Opportunity at Center for an Urban Future. 

The Brennan Center for Justice filed an amicus curiae brief in Atencio v. New Mexico encouraging the court to interpret the New Mexico Constitution independently from federal constitutional jurisprudence.

Suggested Citation: John Surico, What’s Next for the Next Generation of Environmental Rights Cases?, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Feb. 5, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/whats-next-next-generation-environmental-rights-cases